| Douglas Eichhorn's poems frequently achieve a hard core of irreducible expression. The images are convincingly new and sharp, and the pro- gressions they set up in poems result from and release intense feelings, sensuous immediacy. I'm delighted--and, as always, grateful--to see the work of a genuine poet. A. R. Ammons With Rituals Douglas Eichhorn is emerging as a poet of real power. Quietly but insistently, his world is his own. It is an ordinary here-and-now world and the words are ordinary here-and-now words. What is important is the pressures they are wrung out of--what has been kept off the canvas. No flub or rhetorical flammery. No affectations or pretentions. If there are images they exist for themselves, not for padding and ornament. Is there such a thing as modern quietist poetry, at peace in the turbulence? Baxter Hathaway Douglas Eichhorn's poems have that delicacy of emotion and precision of diction which seem to me the very essence of lyric poetry. George P. Elliott His best poems are lyrically clean: that is, unpolluted, free of the wastes of the big-poem industry. Also honest; also passionate. I find myself almost as much moved by what they do not quite allow themselves to say as by what they do. Donald Justice When his form is the lyric, his subject love, and his metaphors drawn from nature, he is, in his own favorite phrase, "at his best." These finely drawn lyrics are the soul of this volume. The comparisons which they imply be- tween human relationships and relationships in nature are as convincing as they are original. I cannot praise these lyrics enough. They are deeply felt, exquisitely crafted, and , I might add, quite rare. Ben Howard index >> |
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